| No Images? Click here   By Elise FoleyHuffPost reporter Ryan J. Reilly pushed past the conspiracy theories and morbid fascination with Jeffrey Epstein's death for this important story about how common it is for people to die by suicide in jails and prisons. These deaths happen frequently — and they're avoidable. He also touched on the culture within the Bureau of Prisons, where prison executives get bonuses and overworked employees get blamed when things go wrong.Ryan shared more about the story and his reporting on deaths in jail.This story builds on years of reporting on jail deaths and internal affairs systems. How did it come together?The day of Jeffrey Epstein’s death, Jesselyn Cook pulled together a piece that drew from on our jail deaths project. Sandra Bland and Jeffrey Epstein couldn’t be more differently situated, but a lot of the lessons from our Highline feature on jail suicides apply to this case as well. The “shock of confinement” takes a real toll, and there were a number of failures within the chain of command here that ultimately denied Epstein’s victims justice. The idea for this follow-up piece was to explore broader issues in the Bureau of Prisons through internal affairs documents I received through a FOIA, as well as look at what the data in our jail deaths database can tell us about Epstein’s death.Was it difficult finding BOP staffers to open up to you about problems there, even anonymously?Not too difficult, fortunately. Union officials have been raising hell about augmentation and staffing shortages inside federal prisons for the past few years, and I had a number of sources from prior reporting. BOP employees contend that this type of incident was inevitable because management has been forcing employees to work overtime, and they’ve ordered non-corrections officers — teachers, social workers, nurses, etc. — to fill in as guards due to management’s failure to maintain proper staffing levels. It’s sort of a “do more with less” scenario. I’ve had a number of employees tell me that a BOP job used to be a pretty steady gig, but that they’d never recommend someone make a career there today.What was your biggest takeaway from reporting this story?That a lot of Americans aren’t aware of the impact of incarceration on a human being. Epstein obviously isn’t a sympathetic figure, but there were plenty of warning signs that he was a suicide risk. Our data suggests that jail detainees accused of sex crimes are more likely to die by suicide. He’s a billionaire who, in the words of one official, went from “owning an island in the Caribbean to a 6-foot-9 cell.” He was likely going to die in prison, given his age and the length of a potential sentence. Yet there’s this refusal amongst many to believe that someone in his shoes would want to take their own life. It’s not that BOP officials aren’t capable of a cover-up — corrections officers lie and “pencil-whip shit” all the time. But the biggest hurdle that conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death need to overcome is that they would require immense competency, and that’s not something that’s necessarily in large supply. This administration tends to look at law enforcement corruption as an issue of “bad apples,” but there are very clearly broader issues with BOP’s culture and practices at play here.What questions were you unable to answer?I think BOP’s internal affairs system needs much more scrutiny. It’s a pretty big disaster, and produces stats that are literally unbelievable for an institution as large as BOP. It’s just not remotely plausible that an institution that incarcerates upwards of 150,000 human beings and employees tens of thousands of people only has a handful of excessive force cases each year. It’d be useful to explore whether raising BOP salaries to make the jobs more competitive would allow the bureau to recruit better candidates and maintain higher ethical standards, as well as take a look at what role the union has played in protecting repeat offenders who shouldn’t be on the job. 🔥 More Must Reads 🔥
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